I see many people on here say this is the truth. Yahshua was our example. When somebody you look upto is your example you usually do what he did. Do you follow the Messiah's example or do you follow traditions of your fathers? Yahshua spoke harshly about following the traditions of men. So tell me how you follow Yahshua our Messiah and not the traditions of men?

Blessings...Miles

I believe Jesus is the way. I help others, pray and love God with my heart soul and mind. I don't watch much television, I don't care for too much stuff, and I try to love others without judging. I ride a bicycle, care about the environment and homeless. I share the gospel with my action and not always with my words. I think actions speak louder than words. I cry with those in pain, and laugh with those in joy. Each day I believe in the hope of his returning. Lots more, but that is the joy of my life. I am also a sinner and ask for forgiveness, and repent.

Yahshua said be you perfect as my father in Heaven is perfect. Now we know Yahshua was the perfect sacrafice because he did not sin. So what is it that made Yahshua perfect. When that is answered you are able to strive for perfection. Not that we will be but we try..Blesssings...Miles

i thing the same think jesus is love i think the same thing jesus is love

Maybe I should put this in a different way. Name what and how Yahshua did his Fathers will. Blessings..Miles

I read the moral teachings of Jesus. The whole way through the story I just shook my head in agreement. He didn't tell me anything that I didn't already know and feel that, to me, is "common sense".

Therefore I felt that his teachings were more on the level of a peer. His message was obviously aimed at people who don't have much common sense.

As far as the idea that he was an incarnation of the creator of this universe, I don't believe it.

There are no writings that came directly from Jesus. All we have is hearsay from people who were living under desperate oppression at the time. I believe that the stories of Jesus were exaggerated to elevate him to the status of a martyr and then later refined into the gospels that we now read. I believe that his elevation to the status of a God was never the intent of the original man named Jesus.

Moreover, all of the teachings of Jesus had been taught by other men centuries before and possibly even millennia before. There was nothing that Jesus taught that was unique or outstanding, save for perhaps the exaggerated hearsay. To think that the hearsay was not exaggerated would be extremely naïve as exaggeration of these kinds of events is the norm for human authors.

Moreover, if Jesus really was the incarnation of the creator of this universe and he genuinely wanted to get an unambiguous message across to people why did he not just write it down himself? Surely an all-wise deity would have had the wisdom to have done at least that much. This is just another indication to me that Jesus had no intention of people reading his words millennia down the road. He was thinking in terms of more immediacy.

To me this is truth.

Do I “follow” the teachings of Jesus? How can I follow someone who thinks the same way I do? I only need to be who I am and I am in harmony with all that Jesus taught. Is being who you are the same as following someone else?

my only truth is that Jesus is my Lord and Savior

Well Abra I know your position and that's fine. We all have freedom of choice. But this is more towrd the believer to see if they know what Yahshua did. And how did this make him perfect.I feel is is my older brother. And no one in history is known through history than Yahshua. The Bible is the #1 Best seller.. Shalom..Miles

Lonewalker but what does that mean? Blessings..Miles

that means that without Him I'm nothing

The Holy Bible is a God Breath through the Spirit through man. Jesus came to fulfill the prophecy. He said that his testimony was not needed from man, but God was his testimony. Though John was to write that Jesus was the beginning and the word of God.

God incarnate so he could understand what man must go through, and understand our weakness, he came as a king as a humble servant. SErve one another, its Perfect salvation....

Now

"Maybe I should put this in a different way. Name what and how Yahshua did his Fathers will. Blessings..Miles"

Everything..... Jesus born, lived and died... was God Will

I started this thread to bring out how Yahshua lived. What was his beliefs. So that we could all point out something Yahshua did that we should be doing. Do we not know what Yahshua lived his life? Blessings of Hope...Miles

Miles,

I am guessing that you are trying to take people down a path that will lead them to see that Jesus kept God's law. If that is the case, then, you will not be able to do it (Rom 8:7)

Art

I'm not overturning bingo tables in the basements of churches.

I don't believe in violent activism.

Truth is perception driven, if someone puts enough faith into the words of somebody else (or another being) then truth is born. Just as well truth is truth, much like belief is harder to break than an idea. If someone believes what they think as truth to be truth then to them it won't change no matter how many points are put against it, it can be done but a very difficult process to say the least.

Peace

Well Art it is sad then that everyone that says they believe are afraid to look at what they say will give them eternal life. That makes them Pharasees in thier own right. If one can not know what thier savior did,lived,taught and showed them. Then they are not believers. They are mere groundhogs afraid if they look in the mirror they may say "I'm melting, I'm Melting". Which will come to pass. May Yahweh Have Mercy...Blessings...Miles

Miles, I'm interested. First I would like to know how you have determined how Yahshua lived, what he taught and what he showed?

I'm curious to learn - how many years of his life have been recorded. How much of what we know of Yahshua, is concentrated in only a few years?

Do we know anything of all the years inbetween recorded acts?

How does anyone know if there weren't mistakes, or even sin committed, by him, in all the years of his life - other than by the faith that he would not, could not have acted in any other way, than what has been recorded?

ALSO, along those lines, how can we know that, in all those lost years, Yahshua was not traveling, and smiling and blessing all those good people, regardless of what faith they held?

How can we know if the actions, that have been recorded, are only those in which others saw some merit?

I'm pretty sure you would find a multitude of people who have been able, for some short period of time, to completely live up to the standards, you place on Yahshua - but that's just it, how does anyone know, what the adolescent, the teenager, and the young man did inbetween the accounts of his goodness?

(These questions are posed with respect. They are not meant as sarcasm or to deny what faith means to those who follow it.)

Miles,

Everyone talks about “believers” and “non-believers” like as if these words have meaning. But in truth these are just frivolous labels that are tossed about to build walls and fences that literally create an ambiance of war between “us versus them”.

As you point out what does it mean to be a “believer”? Does it suffice to simply state that a person believes that Christ was God, or do they really need to believe it?

How many Christians really believe that Jesus was God? Probably an extremely rare few.

And as you say, a person who claims to believe that Jesus was God but who doesn’t bother to seriously study the life of Jesus is only pulling the wool over their own eyes. How can someone truly believe that Jesus was God and not be able to answer any question about the Bible with absolute confidence and conviction?

If they truly believe that Jesus was God there shouldn’t be one page of the Bible that they could not answer any question about. Why? Because if someone truly believes that the Bible is indeed a message from the creator of this universe they would naturally want to know every thing that creator had to say.

I think most people who are sincere about wanting to believe have tried to read the Bible and have seriously become disillusioned with it on an intellectual level. They simply don’t buy into all the stories. They have to believe some pretty crazy stuff not the least of which is the story of Noah.

I mean, to truly believe in Jesus one must also truly believe in the Old Testament as well. And that can be quite difficult for most rational people.

I think many people don’t want to believe in the Old Testament. That picture of a God is not inviting. It simply doesn’t appear to be a very wise or loving deity. It’s more like something out of Greek Mythology and no one believes in that silliness!

But can a believer in Jesus dump the Old Testament? In other words, can Jesus be separated from the Old Testament and stand on his own?

The answer, if we accept that the gospels are indeed the “gospel truth” verbatim, is that Jesus cannot be separated from the Old Testament. In fact many have tried to separate Jesus from the Old Testament and it simply can’t be made to work without assuming that the gospels are indeed full of holes.

So to truly believe in Jesus one must also truly believe in the Old Testament, and most people aren’t any more prepared to believe in that than they are prepared to believe in Greek Mythology.

In fact, this is ever true of many Christian churches. I was born and raised in a Christian environment of Free Methodists. Their approach is to focus on the New Testament, and the life of Jesus. While they don’t denounce the Old Testament, and may even use occasionally for fodder for sermons, they do play it down and push it into the murky background, focusing primarily on the love of Jesus.

Everyone finds the methods of Jesus to be much more inviting than the methods of the God of Abraham. I find it to be quite ironic that these two “Gods” are supposedly a single unchanging God. If that’s the case then why is God so much more attractive in the New Testament than he was in the Old? Why did he preach vengeance and fear in the Old, and love and acceptance in the New? Did this unchanging God have a change of heart?

What makes a person become a “non-believer”?

Well most people take the very narrow-minded approach that all non-believers are simply people who never believed. Non-believers are seen as skeptics who refuse to even consider the possibility that Jesus might have been God. They are out to shoot the religion down from the get-go.

Well, some non-believers may well be like that. But many are not! Many non-believers wanted more than anything to believe! No one could be more sincere in their desire to believe! And because their desire to believe was so great, and so sincere they did precisely what you are suggesting! They dove into the details! They wanted to understand their creator and fully understand the message that was being given to us! In many cases they probably also had a genuine desire to then move on to teach others the truth of this great message!

So they did precisely that. And what they found was a disillusioning mess of wishy-washy ambiguity riddled with blatant contradictions that would require much more than mere faith to believe! Not only would they need to have faith, but they would also need to believe in utter absurdities.

It then became difficult to believe that God is absurd.

This was precisely what happened to Isaac Newton. He wanted more than anything to understand the message from his heavenly father. Most people aren’t aware of the fact that even though he was the greatest physicists of all time, his study of physics paled in comparison with his study of theology. Yet he came away from those studies with grave disappointment and complete disillusionment. He become a non-believer even though is motivation to believe was profound.

Finally, you talk about studying the life of Jesus and ask, “How did he live?”. But how can anyone know? The Bible doesn’t even give his life history! There is a huge gap from about the time he was 12 until he returned at almost 30. Most of the things in the Bible are about what Jesus taught for a few years before he was crucified. And even those are mostly accounts of his public preaching and the time he spent directly with his disciples.

There isn’t any account of what he did with his “free time”. It was known that Mary Magdalene was extremely close to Jesus. She was often called his “closest disciple”. He never officially married her, but their relationship was clearly very intimate. It is said in one place that he refused to have physical contact with her, but then it also says that she washed his feet. Just another of the myriad of contradictions that are in this supposedly divinely inspired infallible book.

If Jesus did have a love affair with Mary Magdalene who would have observed it or wrote about it? Jesus never wrote anything down, and I don’t thing Mary Magdalene did either. Who else would know of their private affair? They were clearly together often in public and there can be no denial that she was very close to Jesus, this is even stated in the Bible. She was also the first to claim to have seen him when he supposedly resurrected. She’s the one who ran off and put this thought into the minds of others. And this is precisely how rumors like these get started and become myths. It easy then for someone else to make similar claims to support her initial assertion.

In summary Miles, I’ve looked into the Bible from the viewpoint of a ‘believer’ and like Isaac Newton I came away disillusioned and unconvinced. My desire to believe was only squelched by closer inspection, not strengthen.

I came away convinced that Jesus was indeed just a mortal man and while I believe he did live, preach, and was unjustly crucified, I am not convinced that he was anymore divine than you or me. It’s much more reasonable to believe that the gospels are gross exaggerations and tainted by rumor, than to believe that they are verbatim truth. There are simply far too many contradictions. Like Jesus refused physical contact with Mary Magdalene he allows her to wash his feet? It just isn’t a consistent story.

Why would God inspire a story that has clear inconsistencies in it? When people tell us things that are inconsistent we suspect that they are either making things up, or they aren’t really sure what happened. Either conclusion is not good for stories in a Holy Book.

I can see putting faith in the spiritual teachings of Jesus as a man. But to genuinely believe that he was the sole one-and-only incarnation of the God of Abraham? No, I’m not convinced. And so this places me in that belittled group of dreaded non-believers. The people who supposedly won’t give Jesus a chance.

I believe religion is a personal thing... I get alot of crap for being my religion and what gives a person the right to knock someones religion or beliefs...

I like your thinking Walker